arXiv subjects

Mark M. Wilde

Publications and source records attributed to Mark M. Wilde.

At least 181 records · Page 10Linked to original sources

arXiv2018

Energy-constrained two-way assisted private and quantum capacities of quantum channels

With the rapid growth of quantum technologies, knowing the fundamental characteristics of quantum systems and protocols is essential for their effective implementation. A particular communication setting that has received increased focus is related to quantum key distribution and distributed quantum computation. In this setting, a quantum channel connects a sender to a receiver, and their goal is to distill either a secret key or entanglement, along with the help of arbitrary local operations and classical communication (LOCC). In this work, we establish a general theory of energy-constrained, LOCC-assisted private and quantum capacities of quantum channels, which are the maximum rates at which an LOCC-assisted quantum channel can reliably establish secret key or entanglement, respectively, subject to an energy constraint on the channel input states. We prove that the energy-constrained squashed entanglement of a channel is an upper bound on these capacities. We also explicitly prove that a thermal state maximizes a relaxation of the squashed entanglement of all phase-insensitive, single-mode input bosonic Gaussian channels, generalizing results from prior work. After doing so, we prove that a variation of the method introduced in [Goodenough et al., New J. Phys. 18, 063005 (2016)] leads to improved upper bounds on the energy-constrained secret-key-agreement capacity of a bosonic thermal channel. We then consider a multipartite setting and prove that two known multipartite generalizations of the squashed entanglement are in fact equal. We finally show that the energy-constrained, multipartite squashed entanglement plays a role in bounding the energy-constrained LOCC-assisted private and quantum capacity regions of quantum broadcast channels.

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arXiv2018

Strong and uniform convergence in the teleportation simulation of bosonic Gaussian channels

In the literature on the continuous-variable bosonic teleportation protocol due to [Braunstein and Kimble, Phys. Rev. Lett., 80(4):869, 1998], it is often loosely stated that this protocol converges to a perfect teleportation of an input state in the limit of ideal squeezing and ideal detection, but the exact form of this convergence is typically not clarified. In this paper, I explicitly clarify that the convergence is in the strong sense, and not the uniform sense, and furthermore, that the convergence occurs for any input state to the protocol, including the infinite-energy Basel states defined and discussed here. I also prove, in contrast to the above result, that the teleportation simulations of pure-loss, thermal, pure-amplifier, amplifier, and additive-noise channels converge both strongly and uniformly to the original channels, in the limit of ideal squeezing and detection for the simulations. For these channels, I give explicit uniform bounds on the accuracy of their teleportation simulations. I then extend these uniform convergence results to particular multi-mode bosonic Gaussian channels. These convergence statements have important implications for mathematical proofs that make use of the teleportation simulation of bosonic Gaussian channels, some of which have to do with bounding their non-asymptotic secret-key-agreement capacities. As a byproduct of the discussion given here, I confirm the correctness of the proof of such bounds from my joint work with Berta and Tomamichel from [Wilde, Tomamichel, Berta, IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory 63(3):1792, March 2017]. Furthermore, I show that it is not necessary to invoke the energy-constrained diamond distance in order to confirm the correctness of this proof.

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arXiv2018

Amortization does not enhance the max-Rains information of a quantum channel

Given an entanglement measure $E$, the entanglement of a quantum channel is defined as the largest amount of entanglement $E$ that can be generated from the channel, if the sender and receiver are not allowed to share a quantum state before using the channel. The amortized entanglement of a quantum channel is defined as the largest net amount of entanglement $E$ that can be generated from the channel, if the sender and receiver are allowed to share an arbitrary state before using the channel. Our main technical result is that amortization does not enhance the entanglement of an arbitrary quantum channel, when entanglement is quantified by the max-Rains relative entropy. We prove this statement by employing semi-definite programming (SDP) duality and SDP formulations for the max-Rains relative entropy and a channel's max-Rains information, found recently in [Wang et al., arXiv:1709.00200]. The main application of our result is a single-letter, strong-converse, and efficiently computable upper bound on the capacity of a quantum channel for transmitting qubits when assisted by positive-partial-transpose preserving (PPT-P) channels between every use of the channel. As the class of local operations and classical communication (LOCC) is contained in PPT-P, our result establishes a benchmark for the LOCC-assisted quantum capacity of an arbitrary quantum channel, which is relevant in the context of distributed quantum computation and quantum key distribution.

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arXiv2018

Applications of position-based coding to classical communication over quantum channels

Recently, a coding technique called position-based coding has been used to establish achievability statements for various kinds of classical communication protocols that use quantum channels. In the present paper, we apply this technique in the entanglement-assisted setting in order to establish lower bounds for error exponents, lower bounds on the second-order coding rate, and one-shot lower bounds. We also demonstrate that position-based coding can be a powerful tool for analyzing other communication settings. In particular, we reduce the quantum simultaneous decoding conjecture for entanglement-assisted or unassisted communication over a quantum multiple access channel to open questions in multiple quantum hypothesis testing. We then determine achievable rate regions for entanglement-assisted or unassisted classical communication over a quantum multiple-access channel, when using a particular quantum simultaneous decoder. The achievable rate regions given in this latter case are generally suboptimal, involving differences of Renyi-2 entropies and conditional quantum entropies.

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arXiv2018

Approximate reversal of quantum Gaussian dynamics

Recently, there has been focus on determining the conditions under which the data processing inequality for quantum relative entropy is satisfied with approximate equality. The solution of the exact equality case is due to Petz, who showed that the quantum relative entropy between two quantum states stays the same after the action of a quantum channel if and only if there is a \textit{reversal channel} that recovers the original states after the channel acts. Furthermore, this reversal channel can be constructed explicitly and is now called the \textit{Petz recovery map}. Recent developments have shown that a variation of the Petz recovery map works well for recovery in the case of approximate equality of the data processing inequality. Our main contribution here is a proof that bosonic Gaussian states and channels possess a particular closure property, namely, that the Petz recovery map associated to a bosonic Gaussian state $σ$ and a bosonic Gaussian channel $\mathcal{N}$ is itself a bosonic Gaussian channel. We furthermore give an explicit construction of the Petz recovery map in this case, in terms of the mean vector and covariance matrix of the state $σ$ and the Gaussian specification of the channel $\mathcal{N}$.

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arXiv2018

Fundamental limits on quantum dynamics based on entropy change

It is well known in the realm of quantum mechanics and information theory that the entropy is non-decreasing for the class of unital physical processes. However, in general, the entropy does not exhibit monotonic behavior. This has restricted the use of entropy change in characterizing evolution processes. Recently, a lower bound on the entropy change was provided in the work of Buscemi, Das, and Wilde~[Phys.~Rev.~A~93(6),~062314~(2016)]. We explore the limit that this bound places on the physical evolution of a quantum system and discuss how these limits can be used as witnesses to characterize quantum dynamics. In particular, we derive a lower limit on the rate of entropy change for memoryless quantum dynamics, and we argue that it provides a witness of non-unitality. This limit on the rate of entropy change leads to definitions of several witnesses for testing memory effects in quantum dynamics. Furthermore, from the aforementioned lower bound on entropy change, we obtain a measure of non-unitarity for unital evolutions.

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arXiv2018

Recoverability for Holevo's just-as-good fidelity

Holevo's just-as-good fidelity is a similarity measure for quantum states that has found several applications. One of its critical properties is that it obeys a data processing inequality: the measure does not decrease under the action of a quantum channel on the underlying states. In this paper, I prove a refinement of this data processing inequality that includes an additional term related to recoverability. That is, if the increase in the measure is small after the action of a partial trace, then one of the states can be nearly recovered by the Petz recovery channel, while the other state is perfectly recovered by the same channel. The refinement is given in terms of the trace distance of one of the states to its recovered version and also depends on the minimum eigenvalue of the other state. As such, the refinement is universal, in the sense that the recovery channel depends only on one of the states, and it is explicit, given by the Petz recovery channel. The appendix contains a generalization of the aforementioned result to arbitrary quantum channels.

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arXiv2018

Squashed entanglement and approximate private states

The squashed entanglement is a fundamental entanglement measure in quantum information theory, finding application as an upper bound on the distillable secret key or distillable entanglement of a quantum state or a quantum channel. This paper simplifies proofs that the squashed entanglement is an upper bound on distillable key for finite-dimensional quantum systems and solidifies such proofs for infinite-dimensional quantum systems. More specifically, this paper establishes that the logarithm of the dimension of the key system (call it $\log_{2}K$) in an $\varepsilon$-approximate private state is bounded from above by the squashed entanglement of that state plus a term that depends only $\varepsilon$ and $\log_{2}K$. Importantly, the extra term does not depend on the dimension of the shield systems of the private state. The result holds for the bipartite squashed entanglement, and an extension of this result is established for two different flavors of the multipartite squashed entanglement.

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arXiv2017

Amortized entanglement of a quantum channel and approximately teleportation-simulable channels

This paper defines the amortized entanglement of a quantum channel as the largest difference in entanglement between the output and the input of the channel, where entanglement is quantified by an arbitrary entanglement measure. We prove that the amortized entanglement of a channel obeys several desirable properties, and we also consider special cases such as the amortized relative entropy of entanglement and the amortized Rains relative entropy. These latter quantities are shown to be single-letter upper bounds on the secret-key-agreement and PPT-assisted quantum capacities of a quantum channel, respectively. Of especial interest is a uniform continuity bound for these latter two special cases of amortized entanglement, in which the deviation between the amortized entanglement of two channels is bounded from above by a simple function of the diamond norm of their difference and the output dimension of the channels. We then define approximately teleportation- and positive-partial-transpose-simulable (PPT-simulable) channels as those that are close in diamond norm to a channel which is either exactly teleportation- or PPT-simulable, respectively. These results then lead to single-letter upper bounds on the secret-key-agreement and PPT-assisted quantum capacities of channels that are approximately teleportation- or PPT-simulable, respectively. Finally, we generalize many of the concepts in the paper to the setting of general resource theories, defining the amortized resourcefulness of a channel and the notion of $ν$-freely-simulable channels, connecting these concepts in an operational way as well.

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arXiv2017

Strong converse exponents for the feedback-assisted classical capacity of entanglement-breaking channels

Quantum entanglement can be used in a communication scheme to establish a correlation between successive channel inputs that is impossible by classical means. It is known that the classical capacity of quantum channels can be enhanced by such entangled encoding schemes, but this is not always the case. In this paper, we prove that a strong converse theorem holds for the classical capacity of an entanglement-breaking channel even when it is assisted by a classical feedback link from the receiver to the transmitter. In doing so, we identify a bound on the strong converse exponent, which determines the exponentially decaying rate at which the success probability tends to zero, for a sequence of codes with communication rate exceeding capacity. Proving a strong converse, along with an achievability theorem, shows that the classical capacity is a sharp boundary between reliable and unreliable communication regimes. One of the main tools in our proof is the sandwiched Renyi relative entropy. The same method of proof is used to derive an exponential bound on the success probability when communicating over an arbitrary quantum channel assisted by classical feedback, provided that the transmitter does not use entangled encoding schemes.

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arXiv2017

Relative entropy of steering: On its definition and properties

In [Gallego and Aolita, Physical Review X 5, 041008 (2015)], the authors proposed a definition for the relative entropy of steering and showed that the resulting quantity is a convex steering monotone. Here we advocate for a different definition for relative entropy of steering, based on well grounded concerns coming from quantum Shannon theory. We prove that this modified relative entropy of steering is a convex steering monotone. Furthermore, we establish that it is uniformly continuous and faithful, in both cases giving quantitative bounds that should be useful in applications. We also consider a restricted relative entropy of steering which is relevant for the case in which the free operations in the resource theory of steering have a more restricted form (the restricted operations could be more relevant in practical scenarios). The restricted relative entropy of steering is convex, monotone with respect to these restricted operations, uniformly continuous, and faithful.

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arXiv2017

Upper bounds on secret key agreement over lossy thermal bosonic channels

Upper bounds on the secret-key-agreement capacity of a quantum channel serve as a way to assess the performance of practical quantum-key-distribution protocols conducted over that channel. In particular, if a protocol employs a quantum repeater, achieving secret-key rates exceeding these upper bounds is a witness to having a working quantum repeater. In this paper, we extend a recent advance [Liuzzo-Scorpo et al., arXiv:1705.03017] in the theory of the teleportation simulation of single-mode phase-insensitive Gaussian channels such that it now applies to the relative entropy of entanglement measure. As a consequence of this extension, we find tighter upper bounds on the non-asymptotic secret-key-agreement capacity of the lossy thermal bosonic channel than were previously known. The lossy thermal bosonic channel serves as a more realistic model of communication than the pure-loss bosonic channel, because it can model the effects of eavesdropper tampering and imperfect detectors. An implication of our result is that the previously known upper bounds on the secret-key-agreement capacity of the thermal channel are too pessimistic for the practical finite-size regime in which the channel is used a finite number of times, and so it should now be somewhat easier to witness a working quantum repeater when using secret-key-agreement capacity upper bounds as a benchmark.

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arXiv2017

Gaussian hypothesis testing and quantum illumination

Quantum hypothesis testing is one of the most basic tasks in quantum information theory and has fundamental links with quantum communication and estimation theory. In this paper, we establish a formula that characterizes the decay rate of the minimal Type-II error probability in a quantum hypothesis test of two Gaussian states given a fixed constraint on the Type-I error probability. This formula is a direct function of the mean vectors and covariance matrices of the quantum Gaussian states in question. We give an application to quantum illumination, which is the task of determining whether there is a low-reflectivity object embedded in a target region with a bright thermal-noise bath. For the asymmetric-error setting, we find that a quantum illumination transmitter can achieve an error probability exponent stronger than a coherent-state transmitter of the same mean photon number, and furthermore, that it requires far fewer trials to do so. This occurs when the background thermal noise is either low or bright, which means that a quantum advantage is even easier to witness than in the symmetric-error setting because it occurs for a larger range of parameters. Going forward from here, we expect our formula to have applications in settings well beyond those considered in this paper, especially to quantum communication tasks involving quantum Gaussian channels.

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arXiv2017

Position-based coding and convex splitting for private communication over quantum channels

The classical-input quantum-output (cq) wiretap channel is a communication model involving a classical sender $X$, a legitimate quantum receiver $B$, and a quantum eavesdropper $E$. The goal of a private communication protocol that uses such a channel is for the sender $X$ to transmit a message in such a way that the legitimate receiver $B$ can decode it reliably, while the eavesdropper $E$ learns essentially nothing about which message was transmitted. The $\varepsilon $-one-shot private capacity of a cq wiretap channel is equal to the maximum number of bits that can be transmitted over the channel, such that the privacy error is no larger than $\varepsilon\in(0,1)$. The present paper provides a lower bound on the $\varepsilon$-one-shot private classical capacity, by exploiting the recently developed techniques of Anshu, Devabathini, Jain, and Warsi, called position-based coding and convex splitting. The lower bound is equal to a difference of the hypothesis testing mutual information between $X$ and $B$ and the "alternate" smooth max-information between $X$ and $E$. The one-shot lower bound then leads to a non-trivial lower bound on the second-order coding rate for private classical communication over a memoryless cq wiretap channel.

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arXiv2017

Hadamard quantum broadcast channels

We consider three different communication tasks for quantum broadcast channels, and we determine the capacity region of a Hadamard broadcast channel for these various tasks. We define a Hadamard broadcast channel to be such that the channel from the sender to one of the receivers is entanglement-breaking and the channel from the sender to the other receiver is complementary to this one. As such, this channel is a quantum generalization of a degraded broadcast channel, which is well known in classical information theory. The first communication task we consider is classical communication to both receivers, the second is quantum communication to the stronger receiver and classical communication to other, and the third is entanglement-assisted classical communication to the stronger receiver and unassisted classical communication to the other. The structure of a Hadamard broadcast channel plays a critical role in our analysis: the channel to the weaker receiver can be simulated by performing a measurement channel on the stronger receiver's system, followed by a preparation channel. As such, we can incorporate the classical output of the measurement channel as an auxiliary variable and solve all three of the above capacities for Hadamard broadcast channels, in this way avoiding known difficulties associated with quantum auxiliary variables.

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arXiv2017

Conditional Mutual Information and Quantum Steering

Quantum steering has recently been formalized in the framework of a resource theory of steering, and several quantifiers have already been introduced. Here, we propose an information-theoretic quantifier for steering called intrinsic steerability, which uses conditional mutual information to measure the deviation of a given assemblage from one having a local hidden-state model. We thus relate conditional mutual information to quantum steering and introduce monotones that satisfy certain desirable properties. The idea behind the quantifier is to suppress the correlations that can be explained by an inaccessible quantum system and then quantify the remaining intrinsic correlations. A variant of the intrinsic steerability finds operational meaning as the classical communication cost of sending the measurement choice and outcome to an eavesdropper who possesses a purifying system of the underlying bipartite quantum state that is being measured.

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arXiv2017

On the minimum output entropy of single-mode phase-insensitive Gaussian channels

Recently de Palma et al. [IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory 63, 728 (2017)] proved---using Lagrange multiplier techniques---that under a non-zero input entropy constraint, a thermal state input minimizes the output entropy of a pure-loss bosonic channel. In this note, we present our attempt to generalize this result to all single-mode gauge-covariant Gaussian channels by using similar techniques. Unlike the case of the pure-loss channel, we cannot prove that the thermal input state is the only local extremum of the optimization problem. %It is unclear to us why the same techniques do not lead to a proof for amplifier channels. However, we do prove that, if the conjecture holds for gauge-covariant Gaussian channels, it would also hold for gauge-contravariant Gaussian channels. The truth of the latter leads to a solution of the triple trade-off and broadcast capacities of quantum-limited amplifier channels. We note that de Palma et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 118, 160503 (2017)] have now proven the conjecture for all single-mode gauge-covariant Gaussian channels by employing a different approach from what we outline here. Proving a multi-mode generalization of de Palma et al.'s above mentioned result---i.e., given a lower bound on the von Neumann entropy of the input to an $n$-mode lossy thermal-noise bosonic channel, an $n$-mode product thermal state input minimizes the output entropy---will establish an important special case of the conjectured Entropy Photon-number Inequality (EPnI). The EPnI, if proven true, would take on a role analogous to Shannon's EPI in proving coding theorem converses involving quantum limits of classical communication over bosonic channels.

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arXiv2017

Unconstrained Capacities of Quantum Key Distribution and Entanglement Distillation for Pure-Loss Bosonic Broadcast Channels

We consider quantum key distribution (QKD) and entanglement distribution using a single-sender multiple-receiver pure-loss bosonic broadcast channel. We determine the unconstrained capacity region for the distillation of bipartite entanglement and secret key between the sender and each receiver, whenever they are allowed arbitrary public classical communication. A practical implication of our result is that the capacity region demonstrated drastically improves upon rates achievable using a naive time-sharing strategy, which has been employed in previously demonstrated network QKD systems. We show a simple example of the broadcast QKD protocol overcoming the limit of the point-to-point strategy. Our result is thus an important step toward opening a new framework of network channel-based quantum communication technology.

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